The Erotics of Grief by Megan Moore

Author:Megan Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Epic Repetition, Epic Grief: The Erotics of Narrating Loss

In the last chapter, I explored Roland Barthes’s feelings of grief on the occasion of his mother’s death—his grief is atemporal, a stasis; yet it is a grief that is simultaneously creative, spurring narrative precisely because he luxuriates in it long after his mother’s passing. Barthes’s grief is both problematic and productive: in staying with the moment of abjection, Barthes claims a paradoxical subjectivity as a writer empowered by loss. He links the moment of grief with the moment of commemoration, rendering the moment of loss (of mother, of identity as son, and, to some extent, self) one of subjectivity, of calling the self into being through writing.

Writing of Barthes’s own death in The Work of Mourning, Jacques Derrida offers a different theory of grief, temporality, and subjectivity—one that exposes his fear of the imperfection of commemoration, which he characterizes as the fundamental flaw of human memory when he imagines the moment of commemoration as one of failure. As Pascale-Anne Brault remarks, Derrida theorizes a kind of mourning that insists on our lack of narratological specificity, in that grief’s iterability denies us a singular moment of subjectivity:

Because of the possibility, indeed the ineluctability, of iteration, we should perhaps not assume that we can ever identify with absolute certainty the object of our mourning. For we might think we are mourning one friend when we are in fact mourning another . . . or perhaps all our mournings are but iterations of the one death that can never be identified—the first death, the total, undialectical death—so that what is mourned is a singularity that exceeds any proper name, making post-humous infidelity the very work of mourning.12

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